Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.

3 Comments

So cutting through all of the marketing hype… they made a low power 32 bit ARM design? I suppose that’s a good thing, though I also think that would have a ton of applications beyond this this new and supposedly magical “internet of things.”

Harry: I hate the IoT label as much as anyway … but I’m pretty impressed with the improvements on this chip compared to the existing Cortex M0, which already had very good power numbers and performance. The biggest difference to me is single-cycle IO on the M0+ versus 2 cycles on the current M0, which means you can get much better performance out of the GPIO if you have to do any complex bit-banging (LCD interfaces, etc.). This was the main reason I stuck to the M3 for LCD stuff because the IO was twice as fast when fully optimised. All in all, it looks to be a nice upgrade and they seem to have improved the right things.

Kevin: Definitely egg on my face for not actually going and reading the official ARM documentation, it certainly seems like they’ve improved a lot of features with this chip. It just seems strange that of all of those amazing features, they chose to advertise the fact that it would be better for the “internet of things.”